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Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY Education.

Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY Education

Jan 30, 2012 12:00 AM EST

They raise chickens. They grow vegetables. They
knit. Now a new generation of urban parents is even teaching their own
kids.

In the beginning, your kids need
you—a lot. They’re attached to your hip, all the time. It might be a
month. It might be five years. Then suddenly you are expected to send
them off to school for seven hours a day, where they’ll have to cope
with life in ways they never had to before. You no longer control what
they learn, or how, or with whom.

Unless
you decide, like an emerging population of parents in cities across the
country, to forgo that age-old rite of passage entirely.

When
Tera and Eric Schreiber’s oldest child was about to start kindergarten,
the couple toured the high-achieving public elementary school a block
away from their home in an affluent Seattle neighborhood near the
University of Washington. It was “a great neighborhood school,” Tera
says. They also applied to a private school, and Daisy was accepted. But
in the end they chose a third path: no school at all.

Eric, 38, is a manager at Microsoft.
Tera, 39, had already traded a career as a lawyer for one as a
nonprofit executive, which allowed her more time with her kids. But
“more” turned into “all” when she decided that instead of working, she
would homeschool her daughters: Daisy, now 9; Ginger, 7; and Violet, 4.

We
think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a
lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that
most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But
education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a
downtown Starbucks
or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a
once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell
Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a
history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled
children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly
educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to
school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.

When Laurie Block Spigel, a homeschooling consultant, pulled her kids out of school in New York
in the mid-1990s, “I had some of my closest friends and relatives
telling me I was ruining my children’s lives.” Now, she says, “the
parents that I meet aren’t afraid to talk about it. They’re doing this
proudly.”

The Schreiber girls spend about two hours a day on formal lessons, including English and math., Doug Adesko for Newsweek

Many
of these parents feel that city schools—or any schools—don’t provide
the kind of education they want for their kids. Just as much, though,
their choice to homeschool is a more extreme example of a larger modern
parenting ethos: that children are individuals, each deserving a
uniquely curated upbringing. That peer influence can be noxious.
(Bullying is no longer seen as a harmless rite of passage.) That DIY—be
it gardening, knitting, or raising chickens—is something educated
urbanites should embrace. That we might create a sense of security in
our kids by practicing “attachment parenting,” an increasingly popular
approach that involves round-the-clock physical contact with children
and immediate responses to all their cues.

Even
many attachment adherents, though, may have trouble envisioning
spending almost all their time with their kids—for 18 years! For Tera
Schreiber, it was a natural transition. When you have kept your kids so
close, literally—she breast-fed her youngest till Violet was 4—it can be
a shock to send them away.

Tera’s
kids didn’t particularly enjoy day care or preschool. The Schreibers
wanted a “gentler system” for Daisy; she was a perfectionist who they
thought might worry too much about measuring up. They knew homeschooling
families in their neighborhood and envied their easygoing pace and
flexibility—late bedtimes, vacations when everyone else is at school or
work. Above all, they wanted to preserve, for as long as possible, a
certain approach to family.

Several
homeschooling moms would first tell me, “I know this sounds selfish,”
and then say they feared that if their kids were in school, they’d just
get the “exhausted leftovers” at the end of the day. Says Rebecca Wald, a
Baltimore homeschooler, “Once we had a child and I realized how fun it
was to see her discover stuff about the world, I thought, why would I
want to let a teacher have all that fun?”

It’s 12:30 p.m. on a Thursday, and Tera and her daughters have arrived home from a rehearsal of a homeschoolers’ production of Alice in Wonderland.
Their large green Craftsman is typical Seattle. There are kayaks in the
garage, squash in the slow cooker, and the usual paraphernalia of
girlhood: board games, dolls, craft kits. Next to the kitchen phone is a
printout of the day’s responsibilities. Daisy and Ginger spend about
two hours daily in formal lessons, including English and math; today
they’ve also got history, piano, and sewing.

Laws,
and home-crafted curricula, vary widely. Homeschoolers in Philadelphia,
for instance, must submit a plan of study and test scores, while
parents in Detroit need not even let officials know they’re
homeschooling. Some families seek out a more classical curriculum,
others a more unconventional one, and “unschoolers” eschew formal
academics altogether. There are parents who take on every bit of
teaching themselves, and those who outsource subjects to other parents,
tutors, or online providers. Advances in digital learning have
facilitated homeschooling—you can take an AP math class from a tutor in
Israel—and there’s a booming market in curriculum materials, the most
scripted of which enable parents to teach subjects they haven’t studied
before.

So
far, Tera says, these books have made the teaching itself easy—insofar
as anything is easy about mothering three kids nonstop. The girls have
started their lessons at the kitchen table, but there are also
sandwiches to be assembled, cats who want treats, and girls who want
drinks or ChapStick or napkins or, in the youngest’s case, attention.

“Violet,
Ginger is getting a lesson, so you have to be quiet,” Tera says from
across the open kitchen, while heating tea and coaching Ginger on
sounding out Y words. “The first word: is it two syllables? What does Y
say at the beginning of a word?”

“Yuh.”

“At the end?”

“Eee? Yucky.”

“Yucky is correct.”

Tera
sits down to eat a bowl of salmon salad while helping Ginger with her
reading workbook. Daisy is reading a fantasy book about wild cats.
Violet is playing with a big clock.

“Sam has a cane and a cape,” Ginger says. “Sam has a cap and a can.”

“If you use your finger, it will work better,” Tera says.

Teaching
Daisy to read was a breeze. With Ginger it’s been more complicated, and
Tera has had to research different approaches. She gives her lots of
workbook activities, because Ginger retains information better when
she’s writing and not just listening. Since hearing about a neurological
link between crawling and reading, Tera also has Ginger circle the
house on hands and knees 10 times daily.

A
school, Tera says, might not have teased out precisely how Ginger
learns best. This is something I heard often from urban homeschoolers:
the desire to craft an education just right for each child. They worry
that formal schooling might dim their children’s love of learning (yet
there is a flip side: a reduced likelihood of being inspired along the
way by the occasional magical teacher, full of passion and skill). They
want their children to explore the subjects that interest them, as
deeply as they care to go. For Daisy and Ginger, that has meant detours
into herbalism, cat shows, musical theater, and deer.

Many
parents are happy to sidestep environments that might be too intense,
loading kids up with homework, making them feel an undue burden to
perform. “The pressure from the reform movement today, from kindergarten
on, has been all about ‘Let’s push, push, push for academic
achievement,’” says Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the
Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, and the author of a
forthcoming book about urban parents’ schooling decisions. Some urban
homeschooled kids, particularly those with special needs, were
previously enrolled in school but not served well there.

In
truth, some conventional schools are making strides toward diagnosing
and remedying each child’s weaknesses. “Differentiated instruction”—the
idea that teachers simultaneously address students’ individual needs—is a
catchphrase these days in public schools. And many elementary
classrooms are no longer filled by rows of desks with children working
in lockstep. But it is also true that you can never tailor instruction
more acutely than when the student-teacher ratio is 1–1.

The
Schreiber girls spend most of their time out and about, typically at
activities arranged for homeschoolers. There are Girl Scouts and
ceramics and book club and enrichment classes and park outings arranged
by the Seattle Homeschool Group, a secular organization whose membership
has grown from 30 families to 300 over the last decade. In a way, urban
homeschooling can feel like an intensified version of the
extracurricular madness that is the hallmark of any contemporary
middle-class family, or it can feel like one big, awesome field trip.

Institutions
throughout the country have discovered a reliable weekday customer in
urban homeschoolers. “Everywhere you turn there’s a co-op or a class or a
special exhibit,” says Brian Ray, founder of the National Home
Education Research Institute in Oregon. Three years ago, the Museum of
Science and Industry in Chicago began to court homeschoolers with free
admission, their own newsletters, and courses designed specifically for
them. Participation has doubled each year. “The more we offer, the more
we sell out,” says Andrea Ingram, vice president of education and guest
services.

A
mini-industry of homeschool consultants has cropped up, especially in
New York City, whose homeschooling population has grown 36 percent in
eight years, according to the school district. (While states usually
require homeschoolers to register, many parents choose not to, so
official estimates skew low.) In Seattle, even the public-school system
runs a center that offers classes just to homeschoolers.

Violet and Ginger during work time., Doug Adesko for Newsweek

“My
kids actually have to tell me to stop,” says Erin McKinney Souster, a
mother of three in Minneapolis, whose kids have learned to find an
academic lesson in something as mundane as the construction of a
roller-rink floor. “Everything is always sounding so cool and so fun.”

Still,
you can’t help but wonder whether there’s a cost to all this family
togetherness. There are the moms, of course, who for two decades have
their lives completely absorbed by their children’s. But the mothers I
got to know seem quite content with that, and clearly seem to be having
fun getting together with each other during their kids’ activities.

And
the kids? There’s concern that having parents at one’s side throughout
childhood can do more harm than good. Psychologist Wendy Mogel, the
author of the bestselling book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,
admires the way homeschoolers manage to “give their children a
childhood” in an ultracompetitive world. Yet she wonders how kids who
spend so much time within a deliberately crafted community will learn to
work with people from backgrounds nothing like theirs. She worries,
too, about eventual teenage rebellion in families that are so enmeshed.

Typical
urban homeschooled kids do tend to find the space they need by the time
they reach those teenage years, participating independently in a wealth
of activities. That’s just as well for their parents, who by that time
can often use a breather. And it has made them more appealing to
colleges, which have grown more welcoming as they find that
homeschoolers do fine academically. In some ways these students may
arrive at college more prepared, as they’ve had practice charting their
own intellectual directions, though parents say they sometimes bristle
at having to suffer through courses and professors they don’t like.

Tera
figures that her daughters are out in the world enough to interact with
all sorts of people. She feels certain they will be able to be good
citizens precisely because of her and Eric’s “forever style of
parenting,” as she calls it, not in spite of it. It’s hard for Tera to
get too worried when she’s just spent the weekend, as the Schreibers
often do, hanging out on a trip with homeschooled kids of all ages,
including confident, competent teenagers who were happy playing cards
with their parents all evening, with no electronics in sight.

Milo,
my 3-year-old, never wants to go to preschool. So the more I hung out
with homeschoolers, the more I found myself picking him up from school
early, to squeeze in some of the fun these families were having. I began
to think, why not homeschool? Really, there’s something of the
homeschooler in all of us: we stuff our kids with knowledge, we interact
with them more than our parents did with us. I am resourceful enough to
make pickles and playdough; why couldn’t I create an interdisciplinary
curriculum around Milo’s obsession with London Bridge? I calculated what
we’d have to give up if I cut back on work (though some homeschooling
moms work full time or at least occasionally—like Tera, who writes
parenting articles).

But
my husband and I are loyal to what we call “detachment parenting”: we
figure we are doing a good job if Milo is just as confident and
comfortable without us as he is with us. Family for us is more a
condition—a joyous one, for sure—than a project, one of several
throughlines of our lives.

For
many of the homeschoolers I met, family is more: the very focus of
their lives. And they wouldn’t want it any other way. One comfort Tera
and Eric Schreiber held on to when they started homeschooling was that
if it wasn’t working out, they could enroll the girls in school,
literally the next day. That developed into an annual reassessment. By
now their rhythms are deeply their own; they are embedded in a community
they love. And at the college up the road there are plenty of calculus
tutors, should they need them one day.

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